Michele Bachmann no force in Congress

Establishment Republicans have spent years tiptoeing around the tea party, concerned that its hot rhetoric and deep pockets could wreak havoc in their ranks and further disrupt the national party leadership’s carefully laid plans.

But Rep. Michele Bachmann’s sudden fall exposes the reality of tea party players: Their power in Congress is mostly a mirage.

In six years in Congress, Bachmann was plainly unable to translate her cable-friendly bombast into traditional Washington power. And she couldn’t shake up the Republican establishment enough to convert her considerable resources into her own reservoir of muscle.

The Minnesota Republican never got a committee gavel. She managed one major legislative accomplishment — a bridge connecting Minnesota to Wisconsin. House GOP leadership didn’t place her on the Ways and Means Committee when they had the chance. The Tea Party Caucus — of which she was the public face — isn’t at all a force.

Here’s the image that Bachmann cut in the Capitol, according to several top level GOP aides and lawmakers interviewed by POLITICO on Wednesday: she was a sparse presence at GOP strategy meetings and didn’t particularly care about passing legislation. That bridge she helped build? She broke ground on it on Tuesday, one day before she announced her retirement, holding a shovel as she stood next to Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

Rock-ribbed, deep-pocketed conservatives who are favorites of the grass roots haven’t fared well of late — Bachmann is just the most recent example.

South Florida voters booted Republican Rep. Allen West out of Congress in 2012, despite his hefty campaign war chest and frequent appearances on television. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an embodiment of the tea party movement, declined to run for a Senate seat in 2014. Instead, he’ll stay in the House, where, despite a decade of seniority, he wields a single subcommittee gavel. And even former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) has struggled to translate his tea party heft to influence at The Heritage Foundation, where he’s had a rocky start. The group’s recent immigration critique wasn’t well received.

“There’s an established power structure in Washington, D.C. — be it Republican or Democrat — and you got gatekeepers, so you can be the champion with the people, with the grass roots. But there are folks that are the ones that are beholden to who gets to be the committee chairman or the subcommittee chairman or what have you,” said West, who recently set up shop in a Capitol Hill office after raising nearly as much money as Bachmann did for his 2012 election. “We all know that — I’m not revealing anything that no one has ever pondered or is not clearly evident to people.”

That’s not to say that the tea party didn’t shake up the political structure — in many ways it did. The House has been dragged far to the right and Speaker John Boehner’s hands have often been tied by rank-and-file conservatives. And with the once-in-a-decade redistricting making congressional seats even more polarized, most House Republicans occupy seats that are so conservative they’ll have to worry more about primaries than general elections. That incentivizes the kind of partisan rhetoric Bachmann mastered.